Roussel in Translation, Reviewed at Hyperallergic

Nolan Kelly reviews Mark Ford's translation of Raymond Roussel's The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories (Song Cave) in the pages of Hyperallergic. There, Kelly writes, "the French writer Raymond Roussel became utterly convinced he was to be the Dante or Shakespeare of his time." More: 

A closeted gay man with a large inheritance and a penchant for Victorian dandyism, Roussel was finishing a piece called “La Doublure” — an epic poem focused on wordplay (doublure means both an understudy and the lining of a coat). According to his translator Mark Ford, “La Doublure” “consists mainly of relentlessly precise descriptions … of the floats and giant papier-máchê figures that featured in the annual carnival at Nice.” That the book was a complete flop surprised only the author himself, who entered a deep depression and began searching for new methods of narrative creation. He never achieved the renown he felt destined for, but he left behind a legacy far stranger than fame.

Roussel, today, is recognized as an unsung hero to several major avant-garde movements of the 20th century – Surrealism, Dada, and, particularly, French formalist literary camps like Oulipo and noveau roman, which rejected the confines of social realism in favor of more imaginative wanderings. He was hailed as a pioneer and genius by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau, and had a formative influence on American poet John Ashbery, who edited a small-press journal called Locus Solus — the name of Roussel’s second novel — in the early 1960s. That book, along with his more notable Impressions of Africa, were both published before World War I (in small editions, at Roussel’s expense), predating most conceptions of literary surrealism. Roussel’s prose stands brashly ahead of its time in its use of pastiche and mathematics, and its prioritization of form over content. But it is Roussel’s raw imaginative power that makes him timeless.

Continue reading at Hyperallergic.